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6 Responses

I think characterizing what Matt Cutts said about PageRank as meaning that PageRank no longer means anything is a mistake. In his blog post from August 2012, (http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/why-did-my-pagerank-go-down/) Cutts clearly spends an entire email explaining to a Newspaper why their PageRank might have gone down. If PageRank no longer meant anything, he would have said that in his response to them. But he didn't. Instead, he spent the entire email discussing several issues that Google saw with the site that were in violation of the terms of service. As a result, the PageRank dropped 50%.

I think Cutts' comments regarding PageRank in no way undermine the fact that PageRank still is an indicator of a site's authority and value. I think what he's trying to get people (including SEOs) to understand, is that attempting to manipulate PageRank, via sculpting, selling links that pass PR or buying links that pas PR are bad things to do and could hurt your site, possible even getting it removed from Google's index.

I still pay attention to PR as I am managing SEO, but it isn't the be all end all, nor do I do anything to try to articfically manipulate PR on the sites I manage.

I also use all of the other resources you mentioned. One I use that isn't on your list is http://ahrefs.com, and for domain authority I specifically use OSE.

I hope this is a helpful viewpoint. I do think there are a lot of misconstrued notions about things Matt Cutts has to say, with people often over-interpreting or reading things into his comments. Mostly, I think he means exactly what he says, no more, no less.

Yes, this is a perfect example of what I was talking about. Matt Cutts at no point in this video says that PR has no value. In fact, he says exactly the opposite. He says:

"There are a lot of SEOs and people in search who look at the PageRank toolbar, but there are a ton of regular users as well. You would be really surprised at how many just regular people have the Google toolbar and use PageRank as a way to figure out ihow reputable something is....We get into our tunnel vision and think no one else uses the PageRank toolbar, but the fact is a lot of people do."

He goes on to say that Chrome doesn't have a PageRank toolbar and IE10 won't allow toolbars or add-ins of any kind. He talks about how, if IE10 catches on, the PageRank toolbar might not be used by as many people.

He then reiterates: "A lot of people do use it. I believe we will continue to support those people while they use the Google toolbar...but it looks like the writing's on the wall that with IE 10 the Google Toolbar won't be allowed any more on IE 10 in Windows, so we'll see how things develop in the future."

So you see, his video is about the Google Toolbar. He never even addresses PageRank, aside from the fact that it is something in the Google Toolbar. He certainly acknowledges that people use it and that Google continues to support it. In no way did he ever say or even imply that PageRank wasn't a valid way to determine the trustworthiness of a site. In fact, he said just the opposite.

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